I got the profession back on its feet. You've got accreditation going and all those things. I wrote a textbook that bring the modern science into naturopathic medicine. I then want us to start looking at these foundational concepts of naturopathic medicine and start exploring every one of them to see the science support for those concepts and how could we advance them. So that's what I've been doing. I've been lots of different ways of doing it, ranging from writing more books and writing more textbooks, doing basically a regional research, both clinical and laboratory research, and then getting enter of a journal that's PubMed index that lets me write editorials where I get to explore ideas in our medicine. So now in PubMed, I have think about 75 editorials where I poke the medical bear a bit. I'm saying, well, conventional medicine does some things really well, but here's some other areas where medicine's not working so well.

And I just started exploring them one by one. And the more I did it, the more I started getting interested in two areas. Number one was environmental medicine, because as I was looking at research, more and more research I was looking at, we have the highest burden of chronic disease in every age group ever in human history. Why is that happening? Our genetics didn't change. Our nutrition is worse, but not enough to explain the problems. But then we started looking at environmental metals and chemicals. Turns out virtually every chronic disease correlates with one or more environmental chemicals. So I just started looking with patients, okay, well, rather than focus on your disease, let's focus on nutrition. Let's focus on detoxification and see what's left over. And boy, patient after patient, the most effective thing I could do for them. Find out, well, what toxin were they high in? Get the toxin out of the body. Then the bike start working the way it's supposed to. It's a long answer to your short question.

Half of 'em had multiple, so 99% of them had nutritional deficiencies, which is right there a problem. But then I started looking at toxins and I found all this toxicity, and that's where I started realizing, wait a minute, I got to pay way more attention to toxicity. And I was actually measuring people showing seen all this toxicity, that it's not what you see in the literature. I, I'm looking at real people here say, wait, real people dramatically more nutritional deficiencies, dramatically more toxicity than you see when you read the macro literature. So I started diving into it and getting more and more sophisticated in how you test people for toxicity, how you help people avoid the toxins and how you get 'em out of the body.

Now there's also industrial contamination, and that's a big issue as well in that industrial contamination. Unfortunately, it's going to be more often be more toxic versions of AIC than the inorganic AIC that's found in the water. In general, the primary source of types of AIC people exposed to are our elemental arsenic, which is found in water and arsenal beane, which is form of arsenic found in fish. Turns out arsenal beane is not particularly toxic. Now, there are other forms of arsenic, and this is what's important. We have arsenic when it's being detoxified, it's detoxified through methylation. So you have arsenic detoxified to monomethyl arsene acid, we'll say m, MA for short or monomethyl, arsenic for short, but it's not technically quite the right term, which is actually eight times as toxic as element aic. Then we do a second methylation to do DMA, which is di methyl or cynic acid, which is virtually non-toxic, four times less toxic than elemental aic.

So for the normal person with average normal genetics, they actually get rid of arsenic with a halflife of about two days, two to four days. So in general, when the toxicologists are looking at detoxification, they say it takes about four half-life to get a toxin out of the body. So for example, a person's being exposed to arsenic within a week at most two, if they stop the exposure, it's gone for the vast majority of the population. Now, there are a couple situations where that doesn't happen. Number one is if the person has trouble producing the methyl groups needed to detoxify the aic. And what group would that be? People with high homocysteine people, high homocysteine have troubles with the methylation and they have more trouble with arsenic toxicity. That's number one. Number two, some people because of genetics do the first step of producing a more toxic version of ars, much better than the second step of making it into the less toxic version. It's only 1% of the population For that 1% of the top population, a stick is a big deal for them.

Now, those numbers keep coming down, but once I looked at the research, clearly even below 10 micrograms per liter of urine, you start seeing increased risk for disease. And when I talk about increased risk for disease, I'm not talking about small risks. So right now, look at the research literature as near as I can tell. Again, this is from the research about one out four cases of cancer are due to arsenic. One out of four cases of fatal heart attacks are due to arsenic. 50% of gout is due to arsen, 15% of strokes are due to arsen. Are you aware of any other factor that causes that much disease? It is just stunning. So I recommend for everybody whenever I'm not in private practice anymore, but people still keep asking me for help. So anybody comes to ask me for help, I always test them for toxins. I always test them for ARS stick. And that's why that particular person you and I are working with, I mean, I assume you're as surprised as I am to see how high his ARS stick levels were.

So they're going to assume that, oh, it's mainly ace beane and ignore not going further. But what I found is I looked into the research that with a fish, we person eating fish, about 10% of the arsenic in the fish is in the form of either elemental arsenic or methyl arsenic. The most toxic forms. Now it's true, 90% is arsenal bete, that's fine, but there's still that other 10%. That's the really bad stuff. So I think that the labs have been inappropriately discounting the high levels because they assumed it was just ace beane. Another thing about this ACE beane, which is pretty interesting, and I haven't found this in humans yet, but there's a number of animal models that show that some of the bacteria in the gut of these animals will strip off the ACE beane from the ARS and make into either elemental ARS stick or methylated it into methyl arsenic.

So the idea of say, okay, I'll avoid fish for three days and then test it. Well wait a minute. Well, if say you eat fish every two or three days, you're going to have much higher levels of ARS stick than you think you're going to have if you wait for three days after testing, after eating fish to test for the aic. So at this point, I'm saying to everybody, get your ARS stick tested, and if it's above 10, do a speciation. But even if it's at 10, you need to do genetics to see if you're one of those people who is really fast at the first phase of that RT detox and slow in the second phase because 10 is likely going to cause trouble. And by the way, when we're looking at total arsenic, most of the increased risk for disease starts at around six. I'm been sticking with kind of the WHO levels because that's the worldwide level, but I'm going to tell you, I can show you research that started at six total arsenic in the urine. You start seeing increased disease risks.

Now it's no longer the standard of care, but many of the places growing the chickens are still using arsenic, and now it's becoming quasi-legal at this point. At some point, it'll stop happening, but you can't assume the chicken doesn't have arsen unless to test it. And the third major source is rice. And it's because rice for some reason, likes to absorb arsenic. So beans like soybeans, like to absorb cadium. If the water, the rice is growing and has arsine in it, it's going to absorb the arsenic. And unfortunately, it doesn't matter whether it's white rice or brown rice, organic rice or convent grown rice, all ice rice can have arsenic in it, but brown rice can have a little bit more gets in the skin. Now, the good news is that if you cook the rice for about three minutes and th throw off the water, you'll get rid of over half the arsine. The bad news is you also get rid of over half the minerals too.

We are exposed to devolve as a species that we got the detox enzymes for them. So turns out that arsenic, bisphenols, phthalates, a number of these really common toxins, if you simply avoid them within two weeks, they're out of the body. So we get these non persistent toxins out of the body. Within two weeks, people start feeling better. They say, wow, my symptoms a little less. Well, I got a little more energy. Then makes them more able than in more might say, committed to get rid of the long-term toxins. These toxins that have half lives in the range of months to years to even decades. You look at the PCBs, poly cornium, biphenyls, they get in farmed fish. Some of those PCBs are so hard to detoxify, they have a 20 year half-life, which means you go to the restaurant, you buy the farmed fish, and some of those PCBs are going to be in your body for the rest of your life.

So I spent two weeks, let's just avoid the exposure, start feeling better. Then you say, now let's clean up your gut. It turns out one of the major sources of toxins to the body comes from within when you have the wrong kind of bacteria in the gut. So let's get rid of the toxins, let's get the gut cleaned up, then spend two weeks getting the liver functioning properly. Liver's job is to deal with most of these toxins. And so once you stop overloading the liver with the gut toxins, now we start regenerating the liver. And then finally, by the way, this is new for me. When I was seeing patients 40 years ago, I didn't have to deal with their kidneys. Now I got to deal with their kidneys. Now we have failure epidemic. When I was seeing so many patients way back in the seventies, I never saw people with kidney problems.

And now they're all over the place. Now we got to clean up the kidneys. And by the way, in my class with the students, I used the kidneys as an example of our body's tremendous ability to heal. So let's look at somebody with stage five kidney failure. That means they have EGFR, which is for your listeners. That's how you measure how well the kidneys are working. And it should be above 75. It should be like 90. Okay, but let's say at least 75. Well, people with stage five kidney failure have EGFR of around 12 to 15, which means that they're on kidney dialysis and they're waiting to get a new kidney. You can't live with a 15. So some interesting researchers said, well, let's see. We know that one of the reasons why people have kidney failure is because of non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs, assen and ibuprofen, things like that are very damaging to the kidneys.

So they said, let's take a bunch of people with stage five kidney failure and let's have 'em stop consuming nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and measure the EGFR and let's come back six months later. See what happened. The EGFR average went from 12 to 25 over doubled by simply stopping the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. That was stop damaging the kidneys. They'll regenerate. So I basically say in this chapter, okay, here are things that are damaging the kidneys. Stop doing them. And here are nutrients to help restore the kidneys. And you can get the kidney function back up to normal, but you got to work at it. It works properly. So now we've stopped the exposure, got the gut working properly, got the liver working properly, got the kidneys working properly, now let's do our detox programs. Now our body's able to get rid of them. You don't want to stir things up until your body can get rid of it.

Now the body can get root. So I'd tell people, now here's how you start getting rid of toxins. I had this procedure where slightly reduce calories. So we want to start breaking down some of those tissues. A colonize the person because we alkalize the person easier for the kidneys to get rid of the toxins and we increase their fiber because one of the things, the way the body gets rid of the toxins from the gut is the liver I'M gives rid from the liver. The liver dumps the toxins into the gut. It expects there to be fibroid there to bind to the tox to get out of the body. But there's not enough fiber. The toxins come back with something called interpack recirculation. Well, how much happens here? Let's look at mercury every day our bodies get rid of about 1% of the by load of mercury.

So we've got some mechanisms we buy into glutathione, get out of the body, and then we reabsorb 95% of the mercury we just dumped into the gut. Why are our smart bodies waste all the metabolic energy to get rid of this toxin then just reabsorb it. Well, as evolved as a species, we're consuming a hundred, 150 grams of fiber a day. Now we consume 15 to 20 grams of fiber a day, almost 90% less or about 90% less. So the mechanism of body is expected to work is not there anymore. So when I talk about people, we prepare the body for detoxification, but we make sure we're getting that fiber in there. So biking rid of those toxins when they're being released from the tissues. And the final thing I recommend is good old saunas. Saunas are a very effective way to get rid of every toxin, be able to find, except the performance, the pfos, they're the only toxin that does not go out through the sweat, which was pretty interesting. So I had people sweat at least twice a week, at least 20 minutes of heavy sweating. If you don't get at least 20 minutes of heavy sweating, you don't get enough of the toxins. Toxins

Oral glutathione, I believe is simply expensive glutathione, expensive cysteine, because most of glutathione given orally, whether it's a supplement or there's glutathione in the food as well, it's almost all broken down into cysteine in the gut. So it's a pretty expensive way of doing it. Now you can get people topical glutathione, that works pretty well. You can also get people IV glutathione. Now if you're give people IV glutathione, you have to be a little careful because it turns out, now this is animal research. I do not have human research. It would be kind of heart stite to do because of ethics. But if you take a rabbit and you give the rabbit high levels of mercury and their blood and give 'em IV glutathione, the glutathione will take mercury from the blood into the brain. So it turns out the way the brain gets rid of glutathione, the way the brain gets rid of mercury is by buying into glutathione, pumping across the blood brainin barrier. The rate at which glutathione goes cross blood brainin barrier depends upon the concentration gradient. So you got more glutathione in the brain, then in the blood goes that way. But if there's more glutathione in the blood than in the brain, it goes into the brain. So what I tell people is I'm not saying don't use IV glutathione. What I'm saying is first, make sure you've got the blood levels of mercury down before you get people IV glutathione.

And we found what was pretty interesting is that we found Elevate GGT, not just in the oil field workers, but in many of the doctors and people working on the project. And matter of fact, it turns out the person who had the highest GGT end up having the worst health outcomes of our whole team doing this project. Anyways, going back, look at mine, mine was 27. Now normal range for GGT depends on the lab. It's about 10 to 60. So 27 is right in the normal range. But that's started looking at the research and turns out that GGT within the normal range is predictive of diabetes. So A GGT of 40 to 60 has a 20 fold increased risk for diabetes. What happens, GGT is indirectly measuring toxic exposure to diabetic agents. A GGT between 30 and 60 has an eightfold increased risk for diabetes.

And think about, so wait a minute, 27, wow, I must be more toxic than I thought I was. So I just started becoming more and more careful about avoiding toxins. I got from 27 down to 24, and I said, well, it's still not good enough. So I did it again about three years ago. I was down to 17 and I just did it a few months ago. I was down to 15. So that tells me that as I systematically decreased my exposure to environmental toxins, my GGT went down. So it turns out it's a really useful tool to see are we being effective at getting rid of the toxins?

So I tell people, I don't care what age you are, number one, you have to eat real food. And when I say real food, I'm not talking about the garbage that's in the grocery stores. And if anybody wants to wonder about why that food in the grocery store is not so good, I go to PubMed, get my editorial that facetiously titled Unimportant Molecules. And what I did with that is I went through and looked at nutrition and I looked at, well, what's required for human for life? Human life? When we figured out nutrition, we were studying foods, figure out what's necessary in the foods.

Most of the core nutrition research was done a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago. Our biochemistry was much more limited than is today. But also our technology was more limited than what is today. So at that point, we pretty much could only figure out and mainly using animal research, what had to be in the animal's food to keep 'em alive. And we discovered the vitamins and we discovered the minerals, and we discovered fatty acids and amino acids. And we say, oh, well, when you take any of these things out, the animal animal dies. So we add 'em all together, 43 compounds or molecules and elements. As long as you get those 43 elements and molecules in your food, the food's fine. So we start growing foods chemically. As long as we maintain those 43 molecules we're okay. But then I asked myself, well wait, how many molecules are in food?

All the food is all the world. How many molecules in food? All the world Turns out it's 50,000. So we decided that 99.9% of the molecules in food were not important. So when we grow foods chemically rather than organically, and those molecules are lost and they are lost, it doesn't matter. Well, so well, how much of these molecules lot are lost? They're looking at these flavonoids and carcinoids and lemon and all these different things. They're 90% lower in chemical grown foods than in organically grown foods. I said, well, okay, now are they important? Well, now we start to talk about phytonutrients, these miracle molecules from food. Oh, go drink this. There's this fruit drink. This fruit from South America is full of all these nutrients. Isn't it exciting? Well, yeah, it's exciting, but those molecules should have been the fruit supply to begin with. So now we're saying, okay, well, it's exciting.

We can start giving to people with these pills and things and such. Well, yeah, they could be useful, but let's start with the food, having those molecules in them. So number one is eat real food, organically grown, heirloom, organically grown, if at all possible, number one. Number two is avoid environmental toxins. Now, a lot of people will eat crappy and they'll be okay and they'll be exposed to toxins. They're okay. They don't notice it because we look at the research, most of the research does not show toxicity from most of the common toxins. Now, this is not all toxics. Some show toxicity right away. The vast majority of them, they don't start showing toxicity until a person's about 45 years of age, because up until about 45 years of age, our body's adaptive ability has been able to kind of keep things functioning. But many of these toxin levels are going up in the body higher and higher and higher because they're so hard to get rid of.

And we're now having damage to DNA. So our ability to adapt to these toxins, it becomes limited. So now up to age 45, maybe more diabetes, maybe more heart disease, well age 45 now, the correlation with the toxins, all the very direct, all the toxins, as the toxin levels goes up, all these diseases go up. So don't wait until you're 45 years of age to start dealing with the toxins. Deal with it. Now, my wife, actually last night, my wife and I were just talking about how fortunate we feel that we learn about this in our twenties. So since our twenties, we've been eating organic real food since our toys, we've been avoiding toxins, and now we're maintaining pre-high level of function. But our family and friends who did not follow our pathways, they're dead. They have major disease or they're done with life. It is so sad to see.

I can have all these theories and have all these experiences, but if they're not carried forward, it's pretty limited value. And in terms of my message to people, health is the normal stage of things. I was very fortunate because I got to know my great grandfather as well as my grandfather, my father. I got to see what happened to my own family's life. My great for grandfather died at age 95, had no apparent disease and never saw a doctor in his life. He ate real food and he had his own garden. My grandfather came home from Italy, so he kind of had this Mediterranean diet and lifestyle and health orientation. My grandfather was kind of half European, kind of half American. So while he also lived at age 95, he also had a fair amount chronic disease before he died. And then my dad, who I love dearly, who totally adopted the unhealthy American lifestyle, my dad died at age 88 with all kinds of disease, all kinds of degeneration.

Thank you conventional medicine system for keeping him alive the last 10 years of his life. But we went from my great grandfather never needed a doctor to, my dad desperately needed a doctor just to stay alive with all his chronic disease, and it was all based upon how they lived their lives. My great grandfather and my grandfather grew their own food as much as I could. My dad did not. I grow as much my own food as I can. Another of my graduates, I think he graduated before you did. So Guyano is an ND in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he actually has hospital privileges, but PreOn used for a naturopathic doctor because he was so effective. He and I have having dinner a few years ago and he said, I noticed all my long lived patients have their own gardens,